Minecraft creator Markus 'Notch' Persson isn't working on his sandbox sci-fi game 0x10c any more, but he's looking forward to seeing how the fan-made Project Trillek version turns out.

Persson published an explanation of his decision to stop working on 0x10c after several reports were published over the weekend, based on comments he made on a livestream of a session in the Team Fortress game.

0x10c had been in development for a year, and was Persson's first major project after he appointed a new lead developer for Minecraft, the crafting game that has now sold more than 20m copies across computers, consoles and mobile devices.

On his blog, Persson explained why progress stalled on the new game, pointing to heightened expectations due to the success of Minecraft as one of the key reasons.

"It was quite ambitious, but I was fairly sure I could pull it off. And besides, if I failed, so what? A lot of my prototypes fail way before they get anywhere at all. What I hadn't considered was that a lot more people cared about my games now," he wrote.

"People got incredibly excited, and the pressure of suddenly having people care if the game got made or not started zapping the fun out of the project. I spent a lot of time thinking about if I even wanted to make games any more."

Persson added that over time he "kinda just stopped working on it" and opted to work on other, smaller projects instead, with the most recent example being Shambles, a game created for the recent week-long 7DFPS first-person shooters challenge.

"Turns out, what I love doing is making games. Not hyping games or trying to sell a lot of copies. I just want to experiment and develop and think and tinker and tweak," he wrote.

"Recently, I was streaming some Team Fortress 2, and got asked about the progress on 0x10c. I said I wasn't working on it, and it became news. I understand why, and it really shouldn't surprise me, but I really really don't want to turn into another under delivering visionary game designer. The gaming world has enough of those."

Instead, Persson praises the initiative already underway by fans to make their own version of 0x10c called Project Trillek, which he linked to from his blog post, promising "I want to play this game so much, but I am not the right person to make it".

Instead, Persson is going to continue working on "smaller games that can fail" like Shambles, which although it's been greeted warmly by gamers, wasn't developed with the weight of expectation that accompanied 0x10c – the seven-day game-jam aspect clearly helped there.

"I want to experiment and develop and think and tinker and tweak. So that's what I'm going to do," wrote Notch.

For gamers, it may be a win-win situation: the vision behind 0x10c will still form the basis for a game, while a refreshed Notch firing on all creative cylinders can only be a good thing.